1945 Moscow Victory Parade
The parade lasted just over two hours on a rainy June 24, 1945, over a month after May 9, the day of Germany's surrender to Soviet commanders.
This was preceded by another letter by General of the Army Aleksei Antonov, Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces to all the participant fronts in attendance on the 24th of the previous month which is as follows: Order to the Fronts who will participate in the Victory Parade The Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces has ordered that: 1.
[1] Marshals Georgy Zhukov, who had formally accepted the German surrender to the Soviet Union, and Konstantin Rokossovsky, rode through the parade ground on white and black stallions, respectively.
[2] The fact is commemorated by the equestrian statue of Zhukov in front of the State Historical Museum, on Manege Square.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, stood atop Lenin's Mausoleum and watched the parade alongside other dignitaries present.
He claims that the story was inserted into Zhukov's memoirs as a counterargument to his theory, (although it apparently was in circulation earlier)[3] that Stalin didn't lead the parade because he considered the war's results not worthy of the effort invested.
[4] Suvorov notes several inconsistencies in the story, along with numerous evidence that Zhukov was intended all along for the role of leading the parade; for example, the memoirs of Sergei Shtemenko, the man responsible at the time for the preparation of the parade, state that the roles were decided from the start,[5] and Igor Bobylev (who took part in the preparations) claims that the story never happened and that Stalin never visited the Manege at that time.
Another planned part of the parade was the march of the Victory Banner, which was delivered to Moscow from Berlin on June 20 and was supposed to begin the procession of troops.
Despite this, the weak drill training of Mikhail Yegorov, Meliton Kantaria and Stepan Neustroev forced Marshal Zhukov to not go ahead with this portion of the parade.
[7] One of the most famous moments at the end of the troops parade took place when soldiers from the Separate Operational Purpose Division of the NKVD carried the German standards and threw them down next to the mausoleum.
The inspection part of the parade commenced with Tchernetsky's Jubilee Slow March "25 Years of the Red Army"[10] and ended with the performance of Slavsya.
